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Cake day: July 28th, 2023

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  • Adding the qualifier of “since 2022” seems to presume there’s an unspoken taboo between western liberal media that Putin shan’t be interviewed, rather than Putin being more restrictive than he already was and seeing an opportunity in Tucker. Lionel Barber is probably the closest a “real” US journalist could have been to Putin and writes about the increasing difficulty of this in 2020. This includes psychological tricks like being made to wait excessively long to weaken his cognition before the meeting. He has a good piece on Tucker’s interview about how Putin ran the show and used him.

    The reason why Putin chose this interview is because Tucker is a locus of division in US politics. Tucker isn’t raising Putin’s platform, Putin is raising Tucker’s platform. This imbues Tucker’s reactionary politics with more legitimacy, which benefits Putin.




  • In 1971 there was an oil crisis that put an end to the post-war consensus in the US, and the deindustrialization that followed was a shift to a more professional service financial economy. In China Mao had died and the Cultural Revolution was over. Deng opened up the country to capitalism through a Soviet-style manufacturing push and the creation of economic zones. So we have this relationship between the world’s largest consumer economy and the world’s largest manufacturing economy up to the present day. China’s economic growth currently is outpacing other developed countries post-covid, and they represent a greater percentage of worldwide economic growth than the US, they have the single largest share of the world’s economic growth.

    People in the US who criticize China for polluting is incredibly ironic in this context. US capital interests are more than happy to exploit China’s manufacturing sector, and China takes the blame for all the things that brings with it.








  • The aftermath of racial desegregation court victories are some of the most interesting things in recent US history. A law would be struck down and sort of left like that… and people would take it upon themselves to organize and challenge the new law, often in the face of violent opposition. Freedom Riders taking busses down to the south to challenge desegregation of public transit being met with mobs and put in jail.


  • “Religious suffering is the expression of real suffering and also a protest against it. Religion is the opium of the masses. Religion is the heart of a heatless world. Religion is the soul of soulless conditions.”

    Religion isn’t a separate thing from culture that can be cleaved off like this. The form it takes is contingent on conditions of people’s lives and power structures. People also don’t make a conscious choice to believe or disbelieve in religion, if you’re an atheist you can’t just willingly choose to believe. Society is not directed by the willful actions of people’s collective beliefs like this either, it’s more a Darwinian process.

    Also civil religion is a thing and it doesn’t necessarily align with what people think of “religion” but operates in a very similar way. A lot of atheists are probably adherents to aspects of civil religion without knowing or thinking of it this way.